“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

How about ones that are 100 years old or more? Want to be able to read them online? For free? For real?

See anything that interests you?

(click on above image for better view)

The above screenshot is from The Open Library, “One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.

To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.

To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone! This is an Open project – the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.”

I just entered the search term “family history” and got back 1946 books that are available in their original form to read online! For free!